Upbeat: cheerful, optimistic
Downbeat: pessimistic, gloomy – in music, an accented beat, usually the first of the bar
For various reasons, I’m going to start a series of “things” that are upbeat. Things – I do love abstract, blank words – but what else to call them? Articles? Thoughts? I read a piece – there’s another word – recently by a person who was terribly aggrieved at the thought of what she had considered an area of the internet previously unlittered by non-professional thinkers and writers becoming filled with those quite beneath her touch. Diary entries – there’s another word, term really – she intoned, were interfering with her ability to find curated – another word – edited – yes, another word – intelligent pieces that highlighted the real meaning of publishing or something. She basically told everyone she hadn’t approved of or – vetted – there’s another word – to go back to their corner of the universe and to stop bothering her and the world with their witterings. While I’ve done my best to erase most of the details from my mind, the tone of her piece remains. Dismissive, arrogant, and convinced of her – authority – another word – to weed out and push away those unworthy of her time and consideration.
Fortunately, the universe has been kind, and has sent many indicators that this way of thinking, while prevalent, is not the last word on who gets to create. Who can create, what they create, why they create, and for what purpose is a fairly complex set of questions. Imagine thinking you know best. As people do, but when their beliefs have the end result of being hurtful, or making the world a more uniform and unpleasant place to be, fear and cruelty become endemic. Post-post capitalism at its best.
Think back to art teachers, those of you lucky enough to have still been educated in a system that thought funding the humanities with actual money rather than good intentions was important and not a crazy idea. Good art teachers were patient; everyone’s work went up on the wall. They tried to see what talent was there, and encouraged even children who could barely manage to keep the paint on their brush to keep going. At the other extreme – bad art teachers – sarcastic to a fault, limiting their attention to a specific group who either fed their ego or seemed to know what to do without any instruction, and making sure to only highlight work that reflected well upon them as teachers, or so they thought.
Actually, the MFA program I am now on leave from, had some of those qualities. Eliminate joy; focus on successful connections; encourage sycophants. To be fair, those are qualities in much of the professional world, so well done them. You see what I’ve done there – I’ve focused on the positive. I do keep thinking of the woman sitting across from me at the workshop table who said about a piece of my writing “I’m not sure I understand all of it, but I like it.” The teacher frowned her down. I smiled at her. She didn’t need to do that.
Now to get back to the universe, who provided.
Example one: A fantastic short clip from Rick Rubin, where he basically says that to create is like a diary entry. It’s your take on your experience, therefore no one can say it’s wrong. It’s yours. And all you can do is try to make what you create be truthful to your vision. Don’t think of whether it will change the world, or sell millions of copies, he said. To dive in with that freedom – to choose elements that belong to you and what you see – the joyful playfulness in exploring your thoughts or experiences – was the door to anything else.
We live in a world of sameness. The same shops all over the globe. The same experiences offered to millions of people. The process has been going on for quite a while. Those of you who watched small coffee houses and wholefood stores get swallowed up by larger and larger corporations have seen the public be trained to fear the unique and special and run to the familiar. Perhaps that impulse is a reaction to the less friendly world; perhaps the world has been made less friendly by these changes.
Example two: A clip of Judi Dench and Jay Blades going over a famous speech from Shakespeare. The older man stumbles over the words, reads with a rhythm that is both led by the text and by his hesitancy. Dame Judi is smiling and patient, and delighting in his attempt, watching the beloved poetry and meaning come to life, in the way meaning is reborn in the theatre. Emotion and love and trying and understanding and trying again – the stage is like life, at its best. She gazed mistily at him, tears of joy, and a smile, and compassion for his struggle and love in her wishing to share her life with him, her expertise, her understanding. The clip is confusing though. Why is it happening? Then you discover the man had dyslexia and obviously other elements in his life that kept him from learning to read until he was 51. She is pushing through age with dignity, as she loses her sight. Are either of them bemoaning these painful realities? No – they are embracing what they have and what they found – together.
There was a time when I wanted nothing more than to teach Drama and Media and English and do performance. Some of the happiest moments in my life were when I was working with a very skilled teacher to guide a group of GCSE students to put on a live performance inspired by the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire. Forum theatre, the spect-actor – these elements were going to help these young people to navigate their realities, most of which were complicated. Everything they had heard encouraged them to stay “in their place.” You might be surprised, as I was, to find out that a lot of them had never been the few stops down the line to Canary Wharf, much less into central London. It wasn’t for them, and they didn’t feel welcome, though they’d fight you if you were the person who said that, not them admitting it. The teenage fragility, mixed with class discrimination – tread gently. Canary Wharf, the rebuilding of an area with American-style tall glass and steel buildings, towering over what was left of the small terraced houses and council estates. The naval college at Greenwich, invoking the spirit of empire and a history that had impacted every one of these young people, in myriad ways. They came from the area, generations who hadn’t left; they came from Africa; they came from Eastern Europe; they came from the Caribbean; now they were threading themselves into the history of the Docklands, the different journeys merging in one classroom. They lived down the road from the demolition of structures on the Isle of Dogs, hastened by the end of docks and manufacturing. No one had ever asked these young people or their families what they thought about the changes. No one had ever asked them about geo-political changes, or what it meant to leave a country behind. These were children who were profoundly impacted by decisions taken behind doors in seats of government they had never seen.
The day of the “performance” we took the District Line a few stops, and walked out of the station to stand in Canary Wharf. The hope was that they would see this as an adventure. Their bravado and claims of not needing anything were evaporating as the group got closer to the walkways where the performance would take place, within the precincts of the wealthy and their underlings, champagne and beer, jobs that paid real money, stories unimagined because they hadn’t seen them for themselves. Finally, they all stood silent for a moment, under the towering buildings, watching the people rushing by to jobs, to meetings, to something that none of them could previously see themselves doing. One young woman decided she had enough of waiting or fear, and pushed the others to come with her and change. Finally, they were all ready to act out their wishes and fears, dressed in their costumes: the borrowed suits and skirts, pump heels and polished shoes that were their attempt to look the part. Perhaps people don’t realize that many young people do not have “work clothes” or have seen people go to work in all the paraphernalia of “acceptable” – another word – attire. But they noticed how they felt when they had changed into their costumes. They all admired each other, children playing dress up. And while the workers going by in their outfits may have felt reassured by a familiar silhouette, little by little the students realized that if what they were wearing was a costume, so were the clothes of the people around them, and that maybe their daily life was as much of an act as the play pieces they were putting on. Everyone had on a costume. The students saw how they were accepted if they played the game, saw how it was a game, a play, written with lines, and timings and with roles and boundaries. The office workers who went by looked at us, a group of laughing young people, and wondered what was going on. Few bothered to ask, but some became part of the “play” as the students acted around them, turned to them to speak their lines, both scripted and unscripted.
The work accomplished what it set out to do – the young people felt more at home in a place they had feared; the people who took it for granted became actors in a play – which they were anyway. Their daily lives were revealed as roles in positions and settings that they had as little control over as these students. The artificiality of reality as it is doled out to social classes – any of them – became clearer. The emotional links between the students and their fears and imaginings were tested. And – they were allowed to try, to experiment. Whether they failed or succeeded was irrelevant and impossible to define. Children today are mostly told how to do things correctly. Math and science problems have only one answer. English is to be written in a certain way, paragraphs of fixed lengths and shapes, thoughts in a straight line. Anything else is wrong – see bad art teacher above. Drama in the street validated the lives of these students. There was not one right answer. There were, and are, multitudes of questions, and of answers. Tell one of these students to their face they aren’t worthy, the way you do online. What are you frightened of? Let them try.
Take another school subject. Politicians are aiming at History. Clever of them to realize that history and its narrative is not as monolithic as we were all taught. Crazy of them to think that following a 1984-like directive in isolating particular beliefs and calling them “truth” will go unnoticed. The world of alternative facts; they created it, and now will try to populate history classes with instruction that says slavery was a good thing, the Holocaust didn’t happen, or other impossible tropes of the far right. Does it affect those who think because they read newspapers and own homes, they are immune from this propaganda? The Guardian published a letter from a man asking if he could still go out with a woman who believed the earth was flat. The answer was very gentle and involved a suggestion to consider their values before making any decisions. That this kind of question is being asked is not worlds away from the book burnings in Florida. How far is too far? Consider your values, before you decide that they are negotiable. They matter. And people are asking questions. May they continue to do so.
There are a lot of other examples to show how the willingness to create, to question, to rebel against the conformity of monolithic corporate culture is essential. A writer who shared his version of London exulted in his ability to see the ghosts of his past and the choices of his present; the AV tech I spoke with who when describing his music and his band suddenly smiled, for real, in the midst of setting up for yet another so-called high-stakes really-why event. The realization that I could say no, could walk away from a pointless, demeaning job, embracing risk and daring to feel – that made me smile – for real. The knowledge that people depend on everyone to not see through their games – and the game-changing possibilities of acknowledging that fact. The earth reminds us that seasons change, planets progress, nothing stands still. In the lawn right now, as the light shifts with the season, as the sun goes lower, as the equinox approaches, there is a line between shade and sun. I can choose which side of the dew-covered grass to stand in.
Once you know that their opinions can’t hurt you, you can step into the sun and stop fighting with the dark. You may want their love, or attention, or interest – but you can say no to the gate-keepers and nay-sayers and bad art teachers. The pain of being disappointed or neglected or dismissed is hard; the elusiveness of love is a weight pressing upon your heart, but you can still walk away. Turn your back on those who don’t care anyway, and hold space lightly for those you love. And then head for beautiful, elaborate fields of inquiry, infilled with feeling and the longing for meaning, for connection – even if it fails.
Upbeat, and downbeat – in the musical sense. The first accented note of the bar.
